It may not come to that. Party Chairwoman Carolyn McLaughlin, who along with the party’s law committee is supporting candidate James Long, said Monday that she’ll first poll the membership about whether they even want to hold a roll call vote or would prefer to vote by voice — essentially a shouting of “yays” or “nays.”

According to party rules, any member of the committee can request a roll call vote, subject to the approval of 1/3 of the committee membership by a rising vote (basically, “all in favor, stand up”).

James Long

If that happens, here’s how the roll call process would work, according to Democratic Albany County Elections Commissioner Matthew Clyne, who is also a former chairman of the party. But prepare yourself because it’s about to get very, very wonky.

State Election Law calls for committee votes to be weighted in one of several ways — starting with each election district being assigned a weight according to that ED’s vote in the most recent gubernatorial race. If the district has been changed since the last gubernatorial race, then the Democratic vote from the most recent Assembly race is used. If the lines have been changed since the last Assembly race, the vote is weighted based on voter enrollment.

That’s the case for most of Albany — but not all of it — meaning that the vote in most of the city’s 127 EDs will be weighted according to enrollment, while the vote in a about a half-dozen will be weighted according to the 2014 gubernatorial vote.

As a result, the EDs in the 12th Legislative District will be weighted according to their individual voter turnout in the 2014 gubernatorial race, with each ED’s two committee members receiving a vote worth half of their ED’s assigned weight.

Joshua Farrell

But the rest of the city will be weighted differently, Clyne said. Each of the city’s 15 wards will have their Democratic voter enrollments tallied and divided by the number of election districts in the ward. Each ED (and its respective two committee members) will then be assigned a vote worth an equal share of the entire ward’s Democratic enrollment. A hypothetical example: If Ward X has 1,000 Democratic voters and 10 EDs, each ED is assigned a weighted vote of 100, with each committee member receiving a weighted vote of 50.

That means that each committee member’s vote within a given ward is worth the same but the weight of committee members’ votes across wards will vary depending on the number of EDs in each ward (which varies) and the number of registered Democrats.

For example, 8th Ward committee members’ votes will have a weighted value of 196, while 2nd Ward committee members’ votes will have weighted value of 119.15, Clyne said. The weights for most wards are in the 120-140 range, he said.

If that isn’t complicated enough, consider that two wards — the 15th and 12th — have some EDs that are in the 12th Legislative District and some that aren’t. That means that some committee members in those wards will have votes weighted based on the 2014 gubernatorial vote and others based on enrollment, Clyne said.

As a practical matter, weighting the vote this way likely neutralizes some of the advantage held by the uptown wards, which consistently turn out more Democratic voters than the downtown wards, because enrollment is always higher than actual turnout.

But two of the biggest uptown wards still hold considerable sway, with the 8th weighted at 196 and the 14th weighted at 182.77.

But Clyne noted that the 4th Ward, which covers North Albany and part of Arbor Hill, also has a large weight per committee person — 182 — because it has fewer EDs and committee members.

Clyne acknowledged this system is wacky but said it’s a function of the fact that state Election Law assumes that every jurisdiction within a county will be redistricted at the same time after each decennial census and does not bend well to accommodate situations like those in Albany County, where the county changed its lines in 2011, the city changed its lines in 2012 (requiring some election districts to be amended) and then the county changed its lines again in 2015 after the lawsuit (again requiring the election districts to be reconfigured).

“There’s nothing you can do about it,” Clyne said. “Right now you’re just in a weird Twilight Zone situation because of the multiple redistrictings.”

Got it? Good.

Clyne also addressed another aspect of the letter written by Farrell’s campaign Friday — the assertion that committee members who have been appointed to their seats (instead of elected) should not be allowed to vote. Clyne said that’s not correct.

While it’s true that party rules say that committee members appointed to their seats solely on the authority of the party chair cannot vote in county committee meetings, Clyne noted that one of the first orders of business at every county committee meeting is a formal vote by the full committee to fill vacant seats — a vote he said then empowers those appointees with the full authority enjoyed by any other committee member.

Update: McLaughlin sent me the following this statement this afternoon.

“As long as each ward and district is treated fairly the system will work as designed,” McLaughlin said. “All appointed and then approved committee people will be allowed to participate in the process.”